Do blog platforms affect the first impressions of our blooks?

Blooks come in many shapes and sizes. They are presented in different fonts, with different site designs, and on different blogging platforms. There are as different and as unconnected to each other as one novel is connected to another - there may be some inter textual references, but most of the time they are unique standalone works, beautiful and solitary in birth.

Above all they are websites. Like all websites, blooks are subjected to a 3 second window of opportunity where the user gets his first impressions, and then either moves on, or stays.

Here’s a simple question: have you ever judged a website in 3 seconds? A first impression that shaped what you thought of the site forever?

Yes, you have. If not consciously, then you did so unconsciously. You aren’t likely to read anything from a website with a shocking pink background. And if you do, you’d be cursing the designer every moment you’re there.

Let’s take it a step further:

Does the blog platform on which the blog was published affects your judgment of the overall quality of the blog? No? Yes? For a little while?

Interesting, isn’t it?

I’ve been about the blogosphere for quite awhile, and there are a few things about it that perplex me. This is one of them: why are Blogger blogs less respected than Wordpress and Movable Type ones? It is an unexplained bias, and I find even myself judging the blog by what platform it is on. Blogger? Cheap. Wordpress? Ahh! Some decency. Movable Type? Professional. Custom platform? Wow!

It might possibly be just me, but run a search for the keywords ‘I hate Blogger‘ and compare that to ‘I hate Wordpress‘. The results for the former are in the hundreds; whereas legitimate thrashings of Wordpress are confined to the first 6 results (as of today, that is).

There are a few reasons, I’m sure. The Internet community at large loves open sourced products, and will happily bless Wordpress and defend it despite its faults. Wordpress is the Apple of the Internet’s eye. Blogger is cheap, free, not as flexible or powerful, plus it is home to over a million blogs - most of them personal journals. Before Google took action Blogger was also littered with hundreds of splogs (spam blogs - you know, the ones filled with links to viagra sites … ).

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After eight days we’ve come to the end of our Blogging platforms series - written from an author’s perpective, with limited coding skills. Let’s take an overall look at each of the 6 platforms:

Blogger: -Pros: Flexibility, a good amount of theme control, ease of use. Cons: Bad reliability at times, as well as less than satisfactory speeds. Recommended for blooking, or posting a book in blog form.

Wordpress.com: - Pros: Complete feature set, good looking themes, active development, good support. Cons: Severe limitations - almost no customization (can customize CSS if you pay). Stay away, unless they allow you a greater say in your blog’s theme.

Wordpress.org: - Pros: Robust, stable, in active development, comes with complete support base, open source, free, the list goe on and on. Cons: Steep learning curve for non web professionals who want to customize their blogs, needs own server. The perfect solution for writing a blook because almost anything can be done with Wordpress.

Blogsome: - Pros: Flexible, Wordpress features, ease of use with theme customization, hassle-free plugins. Cons: Reliability, no ability to use own domain name. An okay choice, but the inability to use your own domain name (short of using a redirect, which is a waste of time) should detract you from it.

Terapad: - Pros: One stop location for everything you need in a blog, good cuztomization options. Cons: Interface can be improved - not very easy to use for the first timer, only four themes. Terapad is a wild card - still very new, but promising. Only time will tell as to how it all shapes up.

And, last, but not least:

Vox: - Pros: Ease of use trumps all other 5 selections, huge selection of themes, seamless integration with third party web apps. Cons: Social orientated, so not suitable for blog promotion, no commenting for non Vox users, no theme customization. Use this only if you don’t even know what a blog is. Great for beginners, or for creating fictional blogs of fictional characters. Otherwise, stay away.

And this is the conclusion of the series! Should you ever wish to blog your book, take a stroll through these reviews - I do hope something in there will be helpful to ensure choosing the right blogging platform sets you off to a head start in blooking.

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This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started ten days ago. We’ve reached the end of our series with this review, and of all 6 blogging platforms we’ve talked about Vox is probably the one least suited to writing a blook. But i’m including it in this series, mainly because of its popularity and simplicity.

When Vox was first released by Six Apart it was touted as the social blogging experience. Made for personal blogging, Vox is a cross between a blogging platform and a social network, which can easily be seen in what is called ‘Neighbourhoods’ - a collection of friends, family and other blogs that you read and maintain relationships with. While this doesn’t seem like a proper platform on which to write a book, i chose to review Vox mainly because of its attractions to the everyday user - something an author who is more used to paper and pen might appreciate.

Ease Of Use

Of the other 5 blogging platforms reviewed, none comes close to Vox in successfully integrating text, pictures, audio and video in a single, beautiful posting interface. It’s terribly easy to fall in love with posting in Vox - there even is a question of the day that appears everyday in your dashboard, setting off that spark of creativity whenever you feel lethargic and loath to cook up a post. But is this any good for writing a book online?

Well, Vox makes blogging understandable - even your grandmother can post pictures and videos and bring it all together on an good looking blog. Working with the assumption that the average author knows basic word processing skills, Vox can and will be able to accomodate a blook and make it easy for anyone - even if you’ve never heard of a blog - to post up chapters.

Looks

Vox has a whole plethora of themes, most of them beautiful, jaw dropping, but with limited cuztomization. The most they allow you to do is to upload your own header picture and determine the sidebar positions, but while this may seem harsh, the sheer amount of quality themes they provide more than make up for this. Vox themes allow you to select 3 collumn and 2 collumn variations, as well as sidebar elements and postitioning, thus making sure Vox blogs not only look good, they look different.

There’s not much else to be said about Vox’s looks, other than it looks extremely polished and well thought out, from the homepage to your posting screen to even the ads that pepper the service (they blend in with the background). It’s is free and its themes are click aplenty. End.

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This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started eight days ago. We’ve covered Blogger, and three blogging platforms that use Wordpress, so now we’re going to take a look at Terapad - a new player in blogging, but one with quite a lot of promise.

Terapad is a fairly new member to the blogging world. Apparently their creators took a look at what was available out there, saw that there were all these disparate functions on blogs, and then decided to bring it all together in one nice package, free of charge, but ad supported.

Ease Of Use

Terapad is above average in ease of use. You sense that they absolutely refuse to allow you to touch code, giving you little blanks for sidebar categories to paste your sidebar elements in, and allow seamless integration with third party services like Meebo and Google Analytics. It may take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with where the shiny ‘new post’ button is, but once you do it works slick and fast and easy.

The dashboard for Terapad is tabbed, and cleanly labelled, and each of these tabs when clicked shows you the options page, with a short explanation for what all the elements on page are about at the top. I’d have preferred it if there were little pop-ups telling me what the various options did, but all I got were non-informative little icons.

When it comes to handling text and the written word however, Terapad works brilliantly with no complaints on my part. It has a good editor, plenty of functions, and an easy to understand file system for organizing your pages and/or posts.

Looks

Terapad looks extremely polished. There are only 4 themes at the moment (unfortunately), and you can only touch the CSS for these themes, but everything from the ‘front-end’ to the ‘back-end’ looks beautiful. The Mac icons on each of the menu pages scream OSX, but at the very least it’s plagiarisism that oozes cool.

As for the blogs themselves I’ve yet to see anything jaw dropping, as most of the ‘top 10 sites’ all use one of the four themes (yawn). But a look at the style sheets behind each of these blogs told me that there’s quite a degree of custiomization available to the end user, and as time goes by I’m sure we’ll start seeing good, unique looking blogs powered by Terapad.

Features

Terapad comes bundled with its own stat service, as well as forums, a store, a careers page, an events page and an image gallery. When you actually think about it, all of these tabs can be used by authors, with the possible exception of the careers page. The blog section will be for the blook, the events section can be used for book tours and readings, forums are just another way of reaching out to the reader, and the store can be used for eBook selling and/or blatant self promotion.

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This is post is part of the ‘Choosing the right blogging platform - For Authors‘ series started six days ago. From the more common wordpress platforms, we’re now going to look at Blogsome - also a free Wordpress Multi User service, but with major differences. Let’s see how good it is for writing a blook.

Blogsome has been around for quite some time, and the age of the service shows the instant you log in - Blogsome is using an extremely dated version of Wordpress MU (multi user edition, as they say so themselves). In contrast to the current versions of Wordpress, Blogsome’s user interface is grey, and not as attractive, as we’ll see for ourselves soon enough.

Ease of Use

Blogsome’s option organization is pretty clear cut from the outset, and fairly easy to understand for anyone who’s ever touched a blogging platform. It may be ugly but it’s clean and ugly (wow, talk about a new term for web design), and it gets the job done . There is absolutely no fuss since you don’t upload plugins or themes (more on this particular point later) and the visual editor bundled (with an activated plugin) is barebones and pretty much keeps everything you wish to use a click away. It’s impossible to get confused working on Blogsome, and that’s a very good thing.

Another thing about Blogsome is that there is absolutely no risk of something funny happening with the code, especially when installing plugins. A whole list is right there, waiting for you to activate them one by one - which is a very straightfoward process. Theme selection is based on one page, and the great thing about it is that not a line of PHP is seen anywhere throughout the platform. Good news for beginners, indeed.

Looks

As mentioned before, Blogsome uses an early version of Wordpress, which means the user interface is not quite as pretty as the current blue, saliva inducing one. The themes however, do not lack. Blogsome uses a collection of 4 files to create a theme - one for the main page, one style sheet (css, obviously), one for posts and one for comments. This function is marginally better than Blogger’s and allows for greater theme control on a Wordpress platform. Which can only be good, since you have trackback and the little bells and whistles only to be expected from WP.

Blogsome uses xhtml. It’s easier to understand, easier to use and flexible enough to allow for good looking themes. And since the only code you’ll handle on this platform is xhtml, authors can spend more time concentrating on the story and the plot, minimizing the time needed to bring their work online. Some may argue that you don’t truly have total theme control, but what it allows for is enough freedom for you to choose how your blog should look like.

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